360DigitalInfluence

Since everyone is talking about location let’s extend the conversation Sophia started in her post “Geo-Location Is Truly Everywhere“.

It seems we are at an interesting point in location based content. On one hand you have the early pioneers of this new land Foursquare and Gowalla (I will leave Mytown on its own because of the amazing gaming experience) who are consistently gaining new users. But what happens to Foursquare and the likes when people start tapping into the API for Twitters geo location data and when Facebook checkin gains critical mass ?

The openness of API’s means all platforms can technically benefit because there is more geo tagged content. For example if Foursquare pulled in places data which was actually tagged via a tweet it would only enhance the experience consumers have while trying to oust their others as the “Mayor”.

The flip side is that the critical mass of Twitter and Facebook could mean doom for the little guys. Kind of like when the big box retailer moves into to small town America.

The advantage I see Facebook having in this space is the amount of behavioral data it collects both implicit and explicitly. This could translate into highly targeted content and very relevant offers. If there was a way to opt in for specials or useful content delivered to my mobile device from my favorite brands I would do it. The challenge with the current models is that they are only location based and not preference. This may feel like spam to some.

Assuming the start ups can extend their platforms and keep a fun gaming experience with a proper balance of rewards extending beyond a badge there is plenty of shelf space available.

Only time will tell how this will shake out but either way location based content and marketing has made great progress. It is proving to be a unique way for brands to engage and reward their most loyal customers with special offers based on frequency or prospective customers who happen to be “nearby”.

How do you think this will play out? Will there be a “winner” or Will everyone win because of broader adoption?

For many people, geo-location and location-based social networks are still brand new or are completely unfamiliar. However, these networks and the tremendous growth of geo-location are not even right around the bend – they are already here and growing at a rapid pace. Will geo-location completely change the way we interact?

Location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla are being used by organizations as diverse as the White House and Marc Jacobs. Through these networks, they offered people exclusive content and experiences. The White House used Gowalla to provide citizens a stamp at check-in for attending their recent National Conference on Volunteering and Service conference – giving users a more fun experience. Marc Jacobs took location-based mobile check-ins to the next level by allowing a select number of those who checked in to win tickets to the Marc Jacobs show during Fashion Week 2009.

In addition, Twitter now has geo-tagging for its updates and has established Twitter Places for itself and with Foursquare & Gowalla. On a much larger scale, with over 500 million users, Facebook has recently confirmed that it will indeed have location-based features integrated into its platform – linking the real and online worlds in a much deeper way.

And let us not forget about email marketing. MailChimp announced earlier this year that it will have geo-targeting integrated into its emails – giving businesses the opportunity to send more targeted emails to customers and clients by IP addresses, not just by zip code or address.

As developments in apps continue and users become more adept with the capabilities of geo-location, the way people interact with one another will shift – allowing people to more readily tap into their own communities and create new ones. And with guests being able to earn real rewards from hotels and airlines simply through location-based mobile check-ins –- geo-location can guarantee that people will begin expecting even more fulfilling, localized and unique interactions from the organizations they care about. 

Weigh In: Does geo-location completely change the way we interact? Or just add another dimension to our lives?

I don’t particularly enjoy business books.  The format is predictable, most  are 80% too long with no salient points beyond the first 2 chapters and too often, they are self righteous works from pundits with scant real world examples to back up their platitudes.

TOUGH LOVE, a new business ebook presented as an innovative Hollywood screenplay defies the issues above in both format and content and manages to entertain in the meantime.  You may know the author, John Moore, as the WOM Enthusiast at WOMMA, the Chief Marketingologist at Brand Autopsy, or the author of 2006’s Tribal Knowledge.  While Tribal Knowledge shared “Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture”, TOUGH LOVE approaches the same company (thinly-veiled as Galaxy Coffee) at a very different time in its business - the present.   Galaxy has hit a rough patch after wandering away from its core beliefs while chasing the “growth” dragon.  While the story is woven as a screenplay, the lessons - John’s thoughts on the brand challenges from the perspective of a former insider - are shared through the interactive “Marketer’s Notes” throughout the .pdf.  Here are my favorite 4 TOUGH LOVE takeaways:

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WPP (parent company of Ogilvy PR and our 360° Digital Influence Team) has been sponsoring a series of technology partnership meetings called “Co-Labs” which are aimed at connecting digital teams to discuss the latest advances in web technologies. I made the trip up to NYC last Thursday to hear from Justin Osofsky, head of the Facebook Developer Network. On a side-note at the Starbucks across the street I ran into the T-1000. I love this town.

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I see posts on lots of social media blogs with weekly updates on the most successful Facebook Pages or types of Facebook Pages (example below) and they always include the same metric: number of fans (now called “Connections”). Likely this is because that number is the most public metric to compare but a little digging into the engagement on a Page came tell you a lot about its success.

You would never measure the success of a retailer by how many people entered the store or the success of a services company by how many people visit the website so why do people get to lazy with Facebook? Here are the metrics that really matter in a successful strategy and while fan count is one of them it may not be your most important. continue reading

This past week, Ogilvy PR of Washington DC had the treat of hosting a discussion with DC-based Facebook representatives Adam Connor and Andrew Noyes. Among the topics discussed was the new Facebook community page feature, which Ogilvy blogged about in April.

Facebook Community Pages 101

For those unfamiliar, a Facebook community page is a separate page that groups users around a common interest. Users opt into the page automatically when they list the interest on their profile.

For example, when I click on my interest in “yoga,” I am taken to a Facebook yoga community page. Here, I can see all of my friends who also like yoga. I learn that my friend Erin “really needs some yoga in her life,” and that my favorite yoga teacher is hosting his next rooftop yoga class at the W Hotel. I can also see status updates from people and companies who would not otherwise show up in my newsfeed: yoga studio events, a yoga apparel company’s new product, what yoga DVDs are for sale. I have a whole yoga community at my fingertips, with current and future connections… all in what appears to be an informative, authentic, non-commercial space.

4 Ways Community Pages Boost Brands

Now, there is ample opinion about why brands need to tread slowly with community pages, and how such pages are harmful to brands (see this post by our Global Managing Director, John Bell). Though I would likewise advise brands to proceed with caution, I also see some silver linings to the Facebook community pages. Here are four ways Facebook community pages can boost brands:

1) Attract new brand followers. Think of the Facebook community page as a crowded expo, with a self-selecting base of consumers who are there to see what’s new. Your brand’s page is one among the many booths competing for attention. By posting engaging updates, you can lure users to your “booth.” If users are inspired by your content, they can easily like your page, and know where to find you in the future. Bonus – this grows your online fan base at no added cost to you. In that sense, these pages are more desirable than paid-for ad space.

2) Create more authentic consumer connections. In an ideal world, brands would do the impossible and create real, face-to-face relationships with consumers. In many ways, Facebook is the next best thing to face-to-face interactions, and community pages help further target the people with whom you need to be connecting. That is, because these community pages allow consumers to find your brand based on what it represents, it creates somewhat of a more authentic brand-consumer relationship.

3) Glean Useful Consumer Intelligence. Facebook community pages can offer some useful quantitative insights on consumers. Sticking with my yoga example from earlier, let’s pretend that you are a running apparel company considering expanding into the yoga market. On the yoga community page, you can tell at a glance that there are 500,000 yoga fans, about a third of the amount of proclaimed running fans. This supports your suspicion that the yoga market may be worth your investment (and considering the 400 million+ Facebook users worldwide, this is no sample size at which to sneeze!).

4) Monitor What People Are Saying About Your Brand. By clicking on a community page, you can also monitor what kinds of conversations are occurring around your brand outside of your page… for better or for worse. This can help you learn qualitative information you might not easily find elsewhere about your potential consumers.

Clearly this list is not comprehensive and omits the glaring pitfalls… like the loss of brand control on user-generated brand pages. Merely, I aim to offer an optimistic alternative to some of the fears surrounding the new feature.

What are your thoughts on the new Facebook community pages? We would love to hear your opinion in the comments below.

A Content Management System (CMS) is one portal to post and edit content, monitor and respond to comments, and create interactive applications across multiple Facebook Pages, Twitter handles, or other communities. There are lots of options out there (e.g. Context Optional, Involver, Vitrue, Buddy Media, LiveWorld, Spriklr, Spreadfast, Media Funnel to name a few) and all of them service Facebook. If you’ve used Hootsuite or CoTweet imagine that but on steroids and just maybe worth paying for.

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When I first started at Ogilvy, our Digital Influence team was an average-sized practice scattered across a few time zones. Now, as the sun sets on the second quarter of 2010, Ogilvy Digital Influence is a large network of experts from around the globe. An all-hands-on-deck staff meeting requires a NASA-powered satellite up-link.

All of this global growth comes with, well, global opportunities. For me this means closing up shop here in Washington and heading half way around the globe to Ogilvy, Hong Kong. In just a few days, I’ll be saying goodbye to the nation’s capital and moving to Hong Kong in an effort to help grow Ogilvy’s digital practice in Asia.

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The 2010 FIFA World Cup kicks off this afternoon, but you don’t have to be in South Africa to be a part of the crowd.

Emirates, a sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 2010 started the Twexican Waveto get rabid football (soccer) fans amped for their favorite teams within the context of the Emirates brand. Users go to www.twexicanwave.com and register their “wave” profile picture (a pic of themselves with their arms in the air) then tweet using #twexicanwave. If #twexicanwave is tweeted without a registered picture, the wave breaks and a new one begins. So why participate? If you are part of the longest wave you’ll be entered for a chance to win Emirates FIFA World Cup packages…so it might just be worth uploading a ridiculous picture of yourself to your Twitter profile, and getting all of your followers to to join the wave.  

As of today, the longest wave is 125 people. We’ll be watching this one closely to see if the virtual wave makes it around the digital stadium.

Besides its relevance to World Cup kick off we like this initiative because it reminds us to think about simple ways to build brand awareness by connecting fun and familiar behaviors with established social media platforms.

* Special thanks to my colleague Annabel Brown in Sydney for bring this fresh thought to the table.

This week, Internet Week is taking place in New York, bringing the city’s bright young things out and about for a “festival in celebration of NYC’s thriving Internet industry and community.”

This is the third time the festival has taken place in the city, and this year occurs at a time of great optimism and digital innovation in and around the Big Apple. The exciting thing for us living and working here is that the energy of the city that never sleeps, is driving technology innovation, the new social movement and a feeling of optimism – certainly demonstrated by the festival line up this week.

The jam-packed schedule includes events from product launches to panels, demos, art shows, and a first time official HQ hosted by Yahoo! and other brands, showing their support for the event. All the big - and little, we are not size-ist - names from across the social web are here taking part in the ongoing conversation.

And the truth be known, it’s not all taking place during these seven days in June. Every single week, there are meet ups, tweet ups, breakfasts for Women in New Media, late night co-working sessions for developers, live and web streamed forums, education sessions, tech discussions and more; something for anyone working with and around the Internet at any time of any given day in New York City.

Entrepreneurs are thriving on this buzz and bringing to market social tools and companies at an amazing rate. Foursquare might have been launched at SXSW but it was born and now is the new poster child for East Coast social innovation. The city itself is looking for a new chief digital officer. The world famous secretive social scene in New York, has opened up with the Twitterati as the people to know about town rather than the secret restaurant concierges.

I hope to see you out and about at the remaining IWNY# events this year, and look forward to what the year ahead will bring. Here’s to Internet Week 2011.